Many companies employ call centers to provide information about products and services to their customers. Often, the demand for information becomes so high that the number of callers who contact a call center at any one time exceeds the number of available agents at the call center. Calls are placed in one or more queues that maintain the calls in a certain sequence, such as the order in which they were received at the call center. As an agent becomes available, the call that is at the first position in the queue is transferred to the agent. The positions of the remaining calls in the queue are then advanced.
Queues prevent call centers from turning callers away when their calls cannot be immediately answered. Nonetheless, a caller may be inconvenienced, by waiting on or near a particular telephone, until the call is transferred to an agent for service. Additionally, maintaining queues requires excessive hardware and manpower at the call center. Every call that is in queue in a call center takes up an available circuit and port, and complex scheduling of human resources and call patterns are required to maintain a “below xx minute” wait time at the call center.